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When Peter Handke and Olga Tokarczuk win the Nobel Prize for Literature, it has an immediate impact on the sales figures for their books and increases the authors' popularity over the long term.
If Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal win the Nobel Prize in Architecture, it will not pay off so directly for the two French architects.
Architecture is a long-winded business.
But it could indirectly promote their special understanding of architecture.
And that would be really good news.
The Stockholm Foundation does not award a prize for architecture.
The industry's Nobel Prize is called the Pritzker Prize, and it was donated by the founder of Hyatt Hotels.
The annual architecture award is endowed with 100,000 dollars - although it is only a tenth of what writers or chemists receive - and the most coveted award that architects can win.
This year the award goes to Montreuil in France, in the eastern Parisian suburb, where Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal have their offices.
The fact that the two are now Pritzker Prize winners is good news also has something to do with the banlieue.
The Parisian suburbs are a symbol of large housing estates of social housing, which in French form look even more grotesque, inhuman and alienated than, for example, living in boxes in the German satellite towns.
Here as there, the wrecking ball is invoked again and again as a brute means against houses that are seen as a threat to social peace, although they are only one symptom among many.
Converted social housing high-rise in Paris: Tour Bois-le-Prêtre by Lacaton & Vassal
Source: Philippe Ruault
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For Lacaton & Vassal, however, destruction is out of the question.
“Never!” This is how the duo is often quoted.
And it has not only been committed to this since conversion and recycling have become en vogue.
"Too many existing buildings that are not old, that still have a life ahead of them and have not yet been scrapped, are being demolished," said Anne Lacaton, born in Dordogne in 1955, of the New York Times.
This is not only a “too much waste of materials”, but also forgets that “there is always something positive that you can take with you from an existing situation”.
Their one year older, Morocco-born Compagnon Jean-Philippe Vassal sums up their common credo in more poetic terms.
"Never tear it down, never cut a tree, never pull out a row of flowers," says Vassal.
"Let's take care of the memory of things that were already there and listen to the people who live there."
The more than a thousand people who live in a high-rise complex in the Cité du Grand Parc in Bordeaux were heard.
They wanted more light, more air, and above all more space in their apartments, they neither wanted to move out of the ten to fifteen storeys nor see the demolition excavators approaching.
Lacaton & Vassal advanced with pragmatism, thrift and originality.
Housing construction in Bordeaux, remodeled by Lacaton & Vassal
Source: Philippe Ruault
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If you follow the ongoing trend towards high-class living in high-rise buildings, the architects assumed in their project description that you should also place this trust in high buildings that, like in Bordeaux in the 1960s, were not planned for the upper class , but as social housing - a term that Lacaton & Vassal are reluctant to use.
They wanted to achieve the high quality in a generous, economical and sustainable way.
The existing houses should be preserved without making major changes to their structure, staircases or floors - but the apartments should have a larger usable area.
The key was simple: additions.
Since their completion in 2017, the apartments have opened up to almost four-meter-deep balconies and winter gardens, which are fully usable and at the same time serve as a climate facade.
At the same time, the floor plans were restructured to give tenants more flexibility to use their larger rooms.
In Germany, only thermal insulation composite systems made of Styrofoam would have been glued to the facade in order to satisfy the Energy Saving Ordinance, but not the needs of residents.
Transformation with comparatively simple means is the principle of Lacaton & Vassal Architectes.
They became known in 1993 with a single-family house, the Maison Latapie.
It was actually not much more than a two-story winter garden, which was immediately scolded by critics as a greenhouse for its building materials.
Since then, transparency has been a trademark of Lacaton & Vassal, which can be individually restricted by the floor-length curtains that you have missed on many of their facades.
New winter gardens in Grand Parc, Bordeaux
Source: Philippe Ruault
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They also favor the steel frame construction, which also offers them the greatest interior flexibility in new buildings, such as a hybrid of residential and office high-rise in Geneva.
The office has now been awarded above all for the promise for the future that it will revive the long-forgotten tradition of building preservation and generally and vehemently oppose the destruction of buildings.
What to do with the unpopular buildings of the sixties and seventies?
The question arises in Germany, which is shaped by uninspired reconstruction in many places, at least as much as in France, which is architecturally sometimes overambitiously modernized.
Lacaton & Vassal answered it in Saint Nazaire five years ago with transformation and condensation.
Keywords that also move German urban planning.
As an example, they have expanded a dreary stump high-rise building with extensions, surrounding balconies, glazed loggias in an area that has become unattractive and, above all, adapted it to contemporary living conditions with contemporary floor plans.
The design idea offers itself as a model for the entire residential area, but the Lacaton & Vassal concept is almost a prototype for an architecture that is as resource-friendly as it is human-friendly.
It is recommended for solving problems that many cities face: on the one hand the lack of living space, on the other hand an excess of existing buildings that are as unattractive as they are energetically unstable.
The Pritzker Prize has been awarded to many star architects since 1979, Tadao Ando, Renzo Piano, Rem Koolhaas, Norman Foster, Richard Meier and Aldo Rossi are on the list, except for Zaha Hadid but hardly any women.
There was an uproar about Robert Venturi because he accepted the award even though his postmodern colleague Denise Scott Brown was expressly not awarded.
New construction project by Lacaton & Vassal.
The architects avoid the term social housing
Source: Philippe Ruault
With the Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena as jury president (himself a prize winner in 2016), a changed objective of the committee can now be recognized, namely to distinguish architecture not primarily as work on the ego, but on society.
Before Lacaton & Vassal, for example, Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara from the Irish office Grafton Architects (2020) or the Indian architect and urban planner Balkrishna Doshi (2018) received the Pritzker Prize.